Solutionman is Here to Get Everybody
Thinking

Rallying for Ideas:The
Thinkathon is organised by the Productivity and Standards Board as part of the
Productivity Campaign Rally to commemorate 20 years of the Productivity
movement in Singapore.The
guest of honour is Deputy Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong.The event will be the world’s largest
brainstorming session and could well be a world first for the most ideas
generated in one hour.

His business is to
make you think.Meet Mr. Gerald Haman,
also known as the “Solutionman”.

Ten minutes with him,
and I was getting two ideas every minute! Just think:Today, he will be conducting a “Thinkathon”
for 8,000 people at the Singapore Indoor Stadium. The aim:Generating half a million ideas in an hour, an
average of 62.5 ideas per head.

Think that’s a tall
order?Not for this expert in creative
thinking.He teaches innovation classes
at the University of Chicago.He
is also the founder of SolutionPeople, which developed the Thinkathon. He said
he has helped companies save over US $2 billion (about $3.5b) since he started
the “Thinkathon” sessions in 1996.

Here’s how it works.
He showed me 100 questions split into 20 categories such as health care,
housing, economy, government, and innovation.“Decide which ones you want to answer,” he said. Two questions caught my
attention.“How might we improve
education in Singapore?” and “How might our government be more
efficient?”

I started my stop
watch and began scribbling away on a notepad.Music piped out from his laptop to help the flow of ideas.

In five minutes, I had
12 ideas.I was then told to stand up
and do some simple exercises for about 15 seconds. Then on to more questions.
In 10 minutes, I came up with 22 ideas.Two ideas a minute. But doesn’t it encourage people to write without
much thought? “This is a tested way of generating ideas and the key lies in
having broad, open-ended questions which encourage people to come up with
ideas,” repliedSolutionman.